Wednesday, April 1, 2015

An EXCLUSIVE Q&A with THE LEATHER NUN's Jonas Almqvist!

All Those Crazy Dreams:

An EXCLUSIVE Q&A with THE LEATHER NUN’s Jonas Almqvist

By Stephen SPAZ Schnee

Every
album has a story to tell. Sometimes, that story could manifest itself as a
lyrical ‘concept’ album that Prog Rock bands are so fond of making. Sometimes,
ultra-privileged Pop artists live their fabulous lives in the spotlight and end
up sharing their ‘hardship’ stories – we can all relate to a lover’s quarrel
while spending a month in Saint-Tropez – with their slickly-produced radio hits.
However, Sweden’s The Leather Nun is
neither Prog nor Pop and their 2015 album, Whatever, has a true story behind it
filled with so many disappointments that it would destroy the soul of a lesser
band. Yet, here they are, 24 years after their last studio album and nearly 40
years after their inception, releasing their most focused album yet.

Led by
singer/songwriter Jonas Almqvist –
the band’s sole original member and visionary – The Leather Nun have never
followed the strict guidelines of the music business. Truth be told, it is near
impossible to confine the band to one genre. Since they formed in 1978, The
Leather Nun has successfully dabbled in so many musical styles that they have
attracted a wide cross section of fans over the years – hardcore followers of Punk,
Goth, Industrial, Garage, Alternative, Rock and New Wave probably own at least
one record by The Leather Nun. Their early singles were released on Genesis P.
Orridge’s Industrial Records label. They’ve had albums produced by Kim Fowley (1988’s International Heroes) and MickRonson (Nun Permanent from 1991). Grammy-winning video/film director Jonas Akerlund is a lifetime fan and
has used their music in several of his projects. And to top it all off, they inspired
loads of Garage, Industrial and Rock bands who still namecheck them in
interviews (and nick some of their pioneering musical ideas on record).
However, the band had been silent for over 20 years until its recent revival by
Almqvist, after a long journey to reclaim his position as one of Sweden’s most
innovative musicians.

Stephen SPAZ Schnee was able to fire
off some questions to Jonas as he prepared for the next step in The Leather
Nun’s long-awaited return to the music scene. Jonas was kind enough to share
his thoughts on the new album, the band’s past and their future…

STEPHEN SPAZ SCHNEE:Whatever is just about to be
released. How are you feeling about the album and the journey you took to
create it?

JONAS ALMQVIST: It’s been a great journey and we’re all really
pleased. If I never get to record another Leather Nun album, I’d still be
pleased. It’ll stand the test of time as the best Leather Nun album.
Originally, Whatever was to have been produced and mixed by Alexander
Hacke, a longtime friend and sound-wizard of Einstürzende Neubauten, but we ran out of funds as well as time, as
Alex was approaching the pre-production of Lament (their 2014 album). We spent
five months recording Whatever working long hours in the
studio. It was intense, hard work but very creative and satisfying.

SPAZ: Why did it take so long between albums? And why did you feel
that now was the right time to release Whatever?

JONAS: When our then record company was swept away
in a bankruptcy in ’92, everything was shattered. Everything we’d built up over
the years by constant touring and record releases was demolished. We’d just
released a studio album produced by Mick
Ronson, outselling every Leather Nun record ever released combined. We were
to embark on the biggest European tour ever and with all shows sold-out in
advance. Major label executives were queuing up on the guest lists. We were
about to take a major leap forward. Then suddenly, there was this big silence.
Phones stopped ringing, people didn’t call back. And then we got word of the
bankruptcy. We had no management, no record company and a publishing company
that decided not to act. We were back to square one with little or no
possibilities to continue. In ’95 we decided to disband for the time being. I
started working full time as an editor for the Swedish music educators’
journal. Apart from myself, no one in the band was interested in taking care of
business. They were pretty pissed with the consequences of the bankruptcy.

In my spare time, I built an ambitious LN website, to at least keep
Leather Nun alive on the fastly growing internet. And I wrote songs. I wrote
about 250 – 300 songs between 1996-98. Not Leather Nun songs the way we’d been
writing songs during the latter part of the ’80s. It was more like blending old
school Leather Nun with influences from both contemporary art music as well as
the Drum ’n’ Bass scene in the UK. Swedish publishers BMG got very interested
in my songwriting and wanted to pair me with young UK producers, but it all
fell through. I know BMG were talking to people in the hip Metalheadz and
Logical Progressions communities in the UK, but they considered the music
either too avant-garde or potentially too commercial! Hahaha!

After a few years, I was approached by the UK label Easy Action. They were then working with three acts: The Stooges, Fred Sonic Smith’s Rendezvous Band and Brian James of The Damned.
With the blessings of Iggy and the Asheton brothers, Easy Action was
releasing bootleg recordings (that’d been circulating as cassettes) as official
records, allowing the former Stooges
members to collect royalties and eventually reform and start touring as Iggy & The Stooges. Anyway, Easy
Action loved Leather Nun. They wanted to have us as the fourth act on the label
and rerelease old albums as well as live recordings that had been circulating
on the bootleg cassette market. And I thought, “That would be awesome!” So I
started to trace old master tapes. But halfway through, I got a call from the
label. Their distributor Pinnacle
was about to close business due to the sudden dramatic drop in record sales,
and Easy Action had to shelf their business for the time being until they could
find another distributor.

It was a bit of a let-down but on the other hand, I’d just been approached
by Bunny Lake, an Electronica band
from Austria. They were signed to Universal Music Austria and had just won the
Austrian Grammy Awards. Bunny Lake and the CEO of Universal Austria were big
fans of Leather Nun and they wanted to make an Electronica version of a Leather
Nun song as a duet between me and their female vocalist. We got as far as
recording a demo version, but then the project got cancelled and Bunny Lake
eventually split up.

In ’10 Leather Nun was suddenly invited to play the biggest, most important
festival in Sweden. We turned down the offer basically because I don’t believe
in nostalgia and I didn’t want to be part of a then growing trend with
reuniting bands playing old hits. But it made me think - could Leather Nun
offer anything vital and relevant to the current rock scene? So I started
writing songs for Leather Nun, for the first time in almost 20 years. And we
played the material to a small group of selected people working in the music
biz (major label A&R’s, DJ’s, journalists, etc.) and it was all ‘Thumbs
Up.’

From then on, it was three years of hard work. Digging out all the old
contracts, securing the name of the band, negotiating and finally reversing all
the publishing rights back to the band, preparing for a legal battle to regain
the masters to the old recordings which had wound up with a sub-label to
Universal Music by mistake due to the mess surrounding the bankruptcy.

By the end of ’13, I’d cleared all the necessary rights to be able to
shop the old publishing rights, shop the publishing rights to the new songs,
shop the merchandising rights, shop for the rerelease of the oldest (and the
formative) Leather Nun songs. By then, we were finally ready to go about
recording a possible new studio album.

It’s been a long journey. I knew it would be a long and uncertain
journey when I took it on. But the way the new songs turned out and the
reception they received, it was worth the three years of legally clearing the
way for a new Leather Nun studio album.

SPAZ: The Leather Nun has always been hard to pigeon-hole,
musically. Do you purposely try to avoid classifications? The new album really
takes a lot of stylistic twists and turns…

JONAS: No. Yes, Hahaha! Good question. I try to write
interesting music for interesting people. Interesting music works long-term.
Interesting music educates the listeners. Interesting music inspires the
listeners. Interesting music sustains and nourishes the ecosystem of the
music-business. I remember visiting the Manhattan penthouse of a Warner CEO in
the late ’80s. He’d seen Leather Nun live and he said, “I love the band and I’d
love to sign the band but I need to label the band in order to sell it. Can I
label you as Punk Rock? Alternative Rock or what?” And I said, ”No, we’re not
Punk Rock and we’re not Alternative – we’re just Rock ’n’ Roll.” Interesting
music doesn’t need labels, because it works outside the box. And every now and
then, there’s a Mark Lanegan, a Trent Reznor, a Gibby Haynes or whoever, who
picks up on the music and makes use of it. If I can write, arrange and produce songs
that differ from the mainstream conception of Rock, I add to the eco-system of
Rock. I prove that you can go about Rock in a slightly different way. I guess I
sort of act out, musically, the theories of Stephen Hawking about the necessity
of imperfection for the development of the universe. I don’t strive for smooth
perfection. I enjoy dynamics and clash of elements.

SPAZ: Were the songs on Whatever written for this particular
project or were they tracks that you’ve been accumulating over the years?

JONAS: They were written for this album.

SPAZ: Is the opening track, “All Those Crazy Dreams,”
autobiographical or is it more of a nod to everyone’s childhood dreams?

JONAS: It was autobiographical and the first song I
wrote for this album. Then I played the demo of the song to a friend – the
guitar player of Swedish band Hardcore
Superstar–
who was just about to sign an international solo contract with EMI. And he just
looked at me and said, “I want that song. That song is about me.” So I guess
the song is kind of universal. Lots of people can probably relate to it.

SPAZ: There are many layers to The Leather Nun’s sound. Songs like
“Just Like A Dream” has some pretty heavy percussion yet the music is quite
lovely. Do you find it more challenging to mix these different emotions into
your songs?

JONAS: Yes. It’s challenging in a good way. It’s like
the band name Leather Nun – the dynamic of opposites. That’s what makes music
and life vivid and interesting. That was one of the things Mick Ronson and I spent hours talking about: what happens if we
bring this element in? What happens if a harmonica plays the saxophone part?
What happens if strings play the guitar part? What happens if…

With “Red Hot Gwen” for example, I wanted to put this “what if?”-thinking
to the test. I wanted to write and arrange a song in the New Orleans Jazz
tradition – but with guitars playing all the different horn parts. I did all
the guitar/horn parts on the demo and it was great fun – it sounded awesome. The challenge in the
studio was to get the guitarists to grasp the idea and make them think and play
like a trombone player, a clarinet player, a flugelhorn player – which is kind
of tricky as guitarists are brought up to think and voice like guitarists.

SPAZ: Was recording Whatever a positive experience for
you? And how did recording the album differ from what it was like when the band
first started their journey?

JONAS: Absolutely. And challenging on all accounts.
In the old days, songs were rehearsed and then recorded live in the studio with
a few guitar overdubs. This time, every song was under the looking glass
throughout the project. What’s the song about? Can this be expressed in a
different manner or with another instrument? And I wanted to use real live
strings instead of fake digital ones. Real instruments carry not only real
sounds and overtones, but also the sound of living musicians, their
personalities, their personal history, etc. That’s what makes music vivid.

No one believed in the project, no one believed in the way we were going
about with the project. Even we had moments when we doubted that we’d be able
to carry this project to the end. We spent five months in the studio, working
10-12 hours each day. But every minute and every penny was worth it. This was
not just another album recording project. It was a boot camp to reboot Leather
Nun. An opportunity to work ourselves into the core and essence of what Leather
Nun was and is about.

SPAZ: Do you prefer to work with the darker or lighter side of
music, or maybe somewhere in the middle? Has that changed over the years?

JONAS: It hasn’t changed over the years. Probably
just got worse. Hahaha! As long as the music seems interesting, I don’t care if
it’s darker or lighter. But I guess I’m ruled by the dynamic of opposites. Back
to Stephen Hawking again! I guess I’m mainly driven by curiosity, trying to
learn the essence of music. And the essence of music is beyond good, bad,
light, dark…

SPAZ: Do you have any particular favorites on the album at the
moment?

JONAS: Actually, no. This is the first Leather Nun
album where every song brings a content smile to my face. It’s a nice
collection of short stories, orchestrated like a concert.

SPAZ: In the early days, you played porno films and had strippers
perform at your gigs. Do you see yourself continuing that trend now that the
internet has made all of that more accessible?

JONAS: No, it would be quite pointless. We never used
porno films or strippers for sensational purposes – as cheap effects or whatever. At those shows,
we wanted to move beyond music. To stress points we were trying to make. And we
felt awfully embarrassed when our record company, unbeknownst to us, hired two
strippers for a sold-out show at Hammersmith in London, UK. That was just
cheap. I still have several friends from back in the early days of Leather Nun,
who were then working as strippers or porn actresses. It wasn’t like Motley Crue. We could sit in the early
hours of the morning having professional talks being young men and women
working different sectors of the entertainment industry. We were bonding rather
than going for flamboyant excesses. And the first time we used a stripper, we
flooded the stage with backlights so people could hardly see her. We were not
exploiting the act of stripping or her nudity – we were teasing the audience.

SPAZ: The late great Kim Fowley produced your second album. Was he
as crazy to work with as everyone says?

JONAS: Kim Fowley was a great personality. I knew of
him pre-punk, pre-Runaways. When his
name came up as a possible producer, I thought it was really nice. Leather Nun
was running blind at that stage, musically. Anything that would add craziness,
might spark off the kind of outside-the-box creativity in the band that we’d
lost down the road. Kim was a really great guy but on his creative downfall – we didn’t realize till
we came to the US to record. He spent most of the time in the studio, answering
female penpal adverts in HM magazines. We’d have to redo lots of stuff on the
recordings when we got back to Sweden, due to it being so poorly recorded.
Apart from a song we co-wrote, naming the album after one of his songs and
having his name on the album cover, Kim didn’t add much to the album. But he
became a good friend and someone we met on and off while touring. When Jonas Akerlund received his Grammy
Award for the Paul McCartney video last year, I texted a greeting message to
Jonas. A few minutes later, Jonas was on the phone from the Grammy after-party,
thanking me and chuckling: “Guess who I am talking to right now? Kim Fowley!
And all he wants to talk about is Leather Nun!” We stayed in touch up until
mid-Fall last year, having the last conversation in late September. We were
talking about the whereabouts of the two teenage Catholic sisters that were
hanging around the studio at the time of the International Heroes
recordings. Then he went silent. I spoke to Jonas Akerlund shortly before
Christmas and he was telling me of Kim’s physical condition and then sent me a
message at Kim’s death.

SPAZ: In the past, you’ve toured the U.S. and elsewhere. Do you
like touring?

JONAS: I love touring. It doesn’t wear me out.
Traveling, new cities, new clubs, new shows and meeting new people every night.
To me, it’s a good way of living. What wears you out when touring are the drugs
and the drinking. Your body never fully recovers in-between gigs. I learnt that
after the first European tours and have stayed off drugs and excessive drinking
ever since. On the other hand, I easily fall in love. That’s my buzz, instead
of drinking and doing drugs.

SPAZ: What’s next for The Leather Nun?

JONAS: We’re working with United Stage, the second biggest booking agency in Sweden next to Live Nation. With the album release
comes gigs and touring in Scandinavia and Europe. Jonas Akerlund wants me to
come over to LA. That’s where we met the first time, backstage at the classic
Scream club in Feb ’88. Jonas had been a fan for years and decided to do a US
coast-to-coast road trip with some friend. The road trip ended in LA at the
time of our show. Jonas was just an unknown video director then, learning the
trade. But that night at the Scream, he got to meet backstage with Ian Astbury (The Cult), Lars Ulrich (Metallica), people from Guns N’ Roses, etc. We had a nice celeb
turnout that night. And I guess that night ignited his video director ambitions
as it connected him with all these people that he’s been hanging with ever
since. Jonas been a good friend, who’s been playing Leather Nun tracks on the
radio, using Leather Nun songs for his first movie Spun. Leather Nun has
been a common denominator in the crowd he hangs with. And Jonas is keen on
directing a Leather Nun video. It all depends on what happens with the album in
the U.S. And we have a number of artistic collaborations in Europe in the year
to come. Side projects within the Leather Nun framework. For instance, we’ll be
doing a 40 minute Industrial Noise-rock show based on the oldest Leather Nun
songs. Material and ideas we worked on during the early Industrial Records
days. Shows that will incorporate European and US artists, as well as live
strings. It’s gonna be like a string quartet playing on top of the burning
ruins of the world. And hopefully there will also be dates set up in Europe
with our old buddies in Einstürzende Neubauten during the Fall.

Apart from that, we’re preparing for the next album. Writing songs.
We’ve already demoed a handful of songs during the winter. That will give us
the opportunity to pre-plan and pre-produce the next album well in advance, in
order to develop and further the musical ideas and layers that we bring to the
table on the Whatever album.

Rock music is such a great genre. There is so much that can be done
within this genre. Endless musical possibilities.

SPAZ: What are you currently spinning on your CD, record, DVD and
Blu-Ray players?

JONAS: Actually, I don’t listen to new music that
much on CD. Most of the Rock music put out today is pretty uninteresting. Few
young bands/artists can produce an album’s length of material, ideas and
visions. Compared to a single (or single track), an album is a journey with a
beginning and an end. It’s like a movie. Lots of bands and artists can make
interesting videos, but few of them can carry the length of a full movie.

In the ‘old’ days, there were singles bands and there were album bands.
And that was great. Problems started when singles bands started to make albums.
Artists and labels pushed the development together. Albums were more prestigious
than singles and with a greater profit margin. And with CDs, you could cram
another 2 to 4 songs onto the album, with the logic that more music meant
better turnover. But the record buyers didn’t follow that logic. “Why would I
pay good money for a piece of plastic containing 14 songs but only 3 or 4 of
them worth listening to?” Instead, the record buyer went for bit-torrent sites
like Napster, where they could review music and pick the cream of the crop free
of charge.

People still love to form bands were they can bang out three-chord songs
for better or worse. Few bands go beyond that primitive stage of just knocking
out new songs –
few bands have musical visions and ambitions.

For the past 20 years, we’ve been force-fed by media that Rock ’n’ roll
is dead. But if you review the figures last year, Rock music is the biggest
genre as for the turnover of digital and physical sales. It’s bigger than Hip
Hop, R&B, Country and other genres. Kanye West and Pharell Williams may go
down better with radio, but Rock is where the consumers are. And Rock is so
much more than AC/DC, U2 or Foo Fighters.

Personally, I’d rather spend time listening to young unsigned bands and
artists on websites like Soundcloud or watch them live, than buy CDs by artists
that cannot produce an album’s length of songs and ideas. In that respect, I’m
pretty old school. I enjoyed the late ’70s/early ’80s with bands focusing on
putting out 7” singles. If you found an interesting 7” single, you’d go and
watch them live. And if you liked the gig, you’d be on the lookout for the next
7” single. And everything built from there. Whereas today, bands and labels
focus on albums that rarely go down well in the streaming world, which is
mainly built around consuming individual tracks.